And by 'D.C.' Politico means 'The trendy parts of D.C.'

The rest of the country has a new reason to hate the inside-the-Beltway crowd: Our economy is better than yours.

At 6.2 percent, the unemployment rate in the D.C. metro region is lower than in any other major metropolitan area in the country — and far below the 9.5 percent national average.

…they’re more or less obscuring the problems that DC itself has. They do note the 1/3rd illiteracy rate in the District itself, not to mention unemployment (which is either 10.9% or 11.3%, depending on which official harbinger of doom you believe more), but the article writer seems more interested in interviewing Republican politicians about how awful DC is compared to the rest of the country than it is in interviewing Democratic ones about why it is that the non-tourist part of the city of DC is in such bad shape. After all, as Politico itself notes: “[f]ifteen cents of every dollar the federal government doles out throughout the world on goods and services is spent in the D.C. metro area,” which raises the question of why the District itself isn’t benefiting more – particularly since it’s a Democratic-controlled city in a Democratic-controlled area in a Democratic-controlled administration. It should be benefiting more, but it isn’t.